According to a number of Yale faculty members on social platforms, jonathan D. Spence, a well-known historian and honorary professor at Yale University, passed away on December 26, 2021, local time, at the age of 85.
Shi Jingqian, considered one of the representative figures of American sinologists after Fairbank, is also known as "the most storytelling historian". Shi Jingqian once commented on the important value of studying Chinese history: "On the map of the whole world, China is an important and extremely attractive existence. Westerners need to spend a long time digesting and analyzing the data they get. Something that can be seen at a glance does not exist. The more vague and faceted our view of China becomes, the closer we are to the most elusive truth. ”
Book lovers who have a little interest in history always have one or two books of Shi Jingqian at home. Jonathan D. Spence, born in 1936 in the United Kingdom, is an internationally renowned expert in modern and contemporary Chinese history, and taught in the Department of History at Yale University from 1965 to 2008. He was the president of the American Historical Society, and his research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese history, the history of Sino-Western relations, and the history of The Chinese legal system.
Shi Jingqian's writings are extremely rich, including "In Search of Modern China", "The Great Righteous Consciousness of the Yongzheng Dynasty", "Taiping Heavenly Kingdom", "Changing China", "Cao Yin and Kangxi", "Kangxi", "Tiananmen", "The Kingdom of the Great Khan: China in the Eyes of the West", "The Death of Wang", "Matteo Ricci's Memory Palace", and "John Hu's Question".
Shi Jingqian studies Chinese history, observes the long history of China from a unique perspective, writes in a "storytelling" way, and is an internationally renowned sinologist and a master of academic bestsellers.
As a Western scholar who studies Chinese history, Shi Jingqian's greatest contribution is to use beautiful and fluent writing to bring about the intricate characters and historical events of modern China, through rigorous historical research, with reference to the research results of experts, and with the traditional historical method of "telling stories", so that Western readers can understand a rich China, and also let the new generation of Chinese have a feeling for their own history.
The famous sinologist Fei Zhengqing once commented on Shi Jingqian's achievements: "In his empathetic and clever narrative, Chinese experienced all this into flesh and blood encounters, although sometimes cruel. By truly copying the characters and their situation, Shi Jingqian lovingly leads us into the lives of these people, making us feel as if we have witnessed all this with our own eyes, as if we have had direct communication with them. This feeling can only be given in the best historical works. ”
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Who is Shi Jingqian
Shi Jingqian is a Chinese name given to jonathan D. Spence when he was studying for a doctorate in history at Yale University, mr. Fang Zhaoyao, a predecessor in history. The meaning is obvious, and the expectations are also high, and I wish him to study history to admire Sima Qian and take him as a model.
Born in a family of scholars in London, England, Shi Jingqian's family has been engaged in research in different fields such as French literature, classical literature, and Italian translation since his grandfather. He has always had a keen interest and curiosity about the humanities, studying British history in college, and the Cambridge exchange program took him to Yale, where he met Mary Clabaugh, and he turned to Chinese history.
Shi Jingqian is known for his research on modern and contemporary Chinese history, along with Philip Alden Kuhn and Frederic Evans Wakeman, Jr. It is also known as the Three Masters of North American Sinology. His lectures on Chinese history at Yale University are one of the most popular courses for students, and his class is always too many students, so many that they have to find a large number of graduate students to form a sizable teaching assistant team. At the same time, he was also rated as the most handsome historian by netizens for his resemblance to movie star Sean Connery.
In addition to his good lectures, Shi Jingqian is also one of the best historians to write. Most of his works can be in-depth and simple, and the writing is smooth and narrative. The famous historian Xu Zhuoyun once described: "Give Shi Jingqian a telephone book, he can start from the first page of the name of the person, and make up the last person's name." He was one of the few authors in the United States to make professional historiography a bestseller, and at the same time had a profound impact on the spread of Chinese historical knowledge in the English-speaking world.
Shi Jingqian's first trip to China was in 1974, shortly after Nixon's visit to China, and he and 14 Yale professors went around China to Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other places. In 2005, Shanghai Far East Publishing House introduced the "American Historian Shi Jingqian China Research Series", including "The Death of Wang: The Fate of the Little People Behind the Big History" and a total of 8 kinds.
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The most storytelling historian
Shi Jingqian began his doctoral dissertation at Yale, "Cao Yin and Kangxi", and began to experiment with a unique research and writing style. He often refuses to participate in academic conferences, rarely writes special papers, but attaches great importance to the interesting and informative nature of the text, and most of his works focus on the fate and struggle of individuals in the turbulent torrent of modern Chinese history.
He single-handedly pushed the biographies of historical figures to the pinnacle, not only writing about the Kangxi Emperor (Kangxi) and Hong Xiuquan (Taiping Heavenly Kingdom), who influenced the course of history, but also about the unique biographies of Chinese who wandered around Europe ("John Hu's Question") and poor women in the countryside ("The Death of Wang").
Cao Yin and Kangxi
He spoke like a storyteller, building structure and suspense like a playwright, but behind this was strict examination - countless Chinese and Western documents, folk correspondence, maps, excavated artifacts, etc., constantly building solid bricks and stones for imaginary palaces. Shi Jingqian is like a delicate craftsman, building his ancient China on paper.
If you were to tell the story of the rural situation in Shandong in the 17th century, how would you write?
Usual historians, if they want to give such a historical space a conclusion, may be based on local history, official notes, brief descriptions of customs and customs, drought and flood epidemics, large and small lawsuits, etc., but how did Shi Jingqian do it?
From a few lines in ancient books, he extracted a deceased Wang clan who had neither a life nor an understanding of emotions, was full of blanks and did not even have a name, and then began to restore the scene based on other historical materials.
Wang's story is simple: she and her husband were destitute, and somehow she suddenly eloped with another man, ran away and was desperate, and finally had to come back alone. On the night of returning home, her angry husband strangled her to death in their dilapidated house.
"Chatting with Zai Zhiyi"
Shi Jingqian completed this work on the basis of the local chronicle of Tancheng in Shandong, Huang Liuhong's "Fuhui Quanshu", and Pu Songling's "Liaozhai Zhiyi". This makes the whole book have "imaginations" of demons, spells, assassins, etc., and reading this book may become a wonderful adventure you have never had before. Shi Jingqian uses falsehood to restore the truth, giving a fictional Wang family real feelings and choices. In fact, she successfully completed the role of the carrier, and the protagonist is the real historical scene behind it.
The Death of Wang
Shi Jingqian did not even come to a conclusion, he just shifted the lens from the macroscopic lens to the life of peasant women in the remote countryside, explored the living environment of the ordinary people in the early Qing Dynasty, and interspersed Pu Songling's literary imagination into the dream, which is his most representative work "The Death of Wang".
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Inspire different cultures to look at each other
Shi Jingqian's "Changing China" explores how modern Westerners have participated in and promoted the historical changes in China, from the early missionaries John Tang and Nan Huairen, to Gordon and Hurd in the late Qing Dynasty, all the way to Borodin, Bethune, Chennault, and Stilwell in the Republic of China period. From the expansion of Western activities in China to the stimulation and adjustment of thinking caused by the contact between Chinese and Western cultures, the dilemma of mutual understanding and misunderstanding during the collision of different cultures is explored.
Changing China: Western Advisers in China
Like Holmes, Shi Jingqian used his advantage of mastering a variety of European languages to enter the labyrinth of Chinese and foreign historical materials, trace the clues hidden behind the curtain of history, and imagine how the characters who went to foreign countries lived in the cracks between the historical and cultural contacts between China and foreign countries, and how their encounters remained into historical memories.
"Matteo Ricci's Memory Palace", dating back to the late Ming Dynasty When the Jesuits came to China to preach, how to use the popular European memory as a stepping stone to break into the Chinese scholar-doctor group.
"The Question of John Hu" is a story of the strange exile of Chinese Catholic John Hu to France.
"The Land of the Great Khan" looks at how Westerners imagine the historical course of China, from the Lubuke monks and Marco Polo in the Mongolian Yuan period to the contemporary Nixon and Kissinger.
Professor Le Daiyun of Peking University once commented: "Shi Jingqian's main contribution is to inspire different cultures to look at each other, thus creating a tension. See yourself as yourself, more closed. I look at you differently than I look at yourself. ”
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